Transferring images from LDR to HDR has become of a new topic in image processing area. With the development of HDR display devices, the dynamic range of the display is getting larger. However, most image contents nowadays are in LDR, because the dynamic range of traditional camera is narrow. With the popularity of HDR display devices, there is an avid demand for transferring LDR images into HDR images to achieve a desired display effect on HDR screens.
Among existing technologies, traditional inverse tone mapping methods only expand the illumination range while do not recover the saturated information in the over-exposure region. The HDR image hallucination methods can recover the saturated information in the over-exposure region by the self-similarity assumption. However, such assumption usually does not hold, making the performance of the methods questionable. Further, the hallucination method needs user interaction to manually decide the over-exposure region and its corresponding self-similarity region, making the method impractical in industry.
The disclosed method and system are directed to solve one or more problems set forth above and other problems.